Whisper
by inkbender
Summary: Based off Steven Moffat's recent revelations on what Series 5 would have been like had David Tennant stuck around another year. The Doctor takes small Amelia Pond out of that large house with its many large, empty rooms and into his TARDIS. Meanwhile, a woman whispers a two-word warning through the cracks in the walls... ON INDEFINITE HIATUS.
1. small Amelia

There once was a small girl on a small planet in a small galaxy in a small corner of the universe who prayed to Santa about the very not-small crack in her bedroom wall. Her aunt had assured her that the crack had always been there, and she remembered it too… but she couldn't but help but feel as if it had not always been that way. Plus she didn't like the woman's voice that echoed on the other side of the wall.

Not two minutes later, a blue Police Box crashed into her backyard shed.

She ran outside, not bothering to don anything other than her pair of little red boots, because her prayer had been answered and an Official Adult was here to help her with her problem.

Well, she was very surprised when out of the police box stumbled not a Police Man, but a Regular Man in a brown pinstriped suit. And by _stumbled_, it was more like _toppled headlong out of the blue box in a tangle of long limbs and fell flat on his face_.

He was obviously not in a very good way right now. Actually, he was very much like Rory, that one time when Kurt and Blaine had asked him ("very nicely" Rory had made sure to add) if he could share his tater tots. When Rory had ("very politely") said no, the school was thrown into a no-holds-barred food-fight brawl, with a couple fists thrown in for good measure.

When the Regular Man didn't move, she tried to pull him upwards into a sitting position, leaning him against the wall of the shed. He cooperated after a second, groaning, his eyes rolling into the back of his head, and he opened his mouth and vomited up _a cloud of __golden light_. Deciding that this was Not Quite Right, the girl ran into the kitchen like she had for Rory to grab a bag of ice and an apple. She applied the bag of ice to his head, like her aunt had told her to do, and pushed the apple up against his mouth, hoping it would block the light from escaping.

The man did _not_ like the apple—only it wasn't an apple, it was a pear, and as he spewed juicy pear mush all over his lap, even more wisps of golden light exploded from his mouth and vanished into the night sky. So she ran into the house again for some more food, but he didn't like the toast or the Nutella or canned peaches or the leftover fish fingers or the custard, so she grabbed a basket from the laundry room on her way to the kitchen and gathered up _everything_ in sight. Then she brought it outside to where the Regular Man was leaning against the last standing wall of the shed that his blue box had crushed and dumped the kitchen's edible contents in front of him.

He literally _pounced _on a banana; when he finished wolfing it down, his eyes seemed to glow with a renewed energy. A burning golden energy that made her slightly uncomfortable, but he kissed her on the forehead anyways and made his way on unsteady feet back to his blue box, where he thanked her for her help and said goodbye.

She wanted him to stay though. She needed somebody to investigate the crack in her wall, be it Regular Man or Police Man. As he unlocked the door, she ran to block him from entry, pushing past his long legs. She intended to turn and face him and present her problem to him—but she never got to the turning part, because the inside of the police box was not a tiny, cramped, dark space, but a wonderland of thrills and marvels. When the Not-So-Regular Man told her that his name was the Doctor and that this was his spaceship that traveled through time as well as space, she didn't even doubt it for a second. After all, if he could squeeze everything into such a tiny area, then of course it made complete sense that the Doctor was a time traveler as well.

She turned around to tell him so—and didn't miss the pain that he immediately tried to hide. The tortured agony in those dark, dark windows to the soul. The depths of his sorrow were beyond her comprehension; she only knew that, though she needed help, the Doctor needed it even more. So she ran back outside and grabbed the rest of the bunch of bananas and offered them to him, because it had brought him such happy relief earlier, and she could see that he needed more of that.

His eyes softened. His grimace of pain stretched upwards into a gentle smile. He took the bananas carefully and, in return, offered her a small blue sphere from the depths of his suit pocket and said to use it if she wanted to find him again, and he'd pop by and say hello. He'd probably be wearing a different face by then, but he promised it would be still be him.

And though this didn't quite make so much sense to her, she accepted the gift and held onto it tightly. The Doctor was obviously in a bad spot now, but, as her aunt said, Everything Gets Better With Time. She told him so as the door swung shut, and he just smiled back at her before closing the door all the way.

And so, she stood by as, slowly, the Doctor's spaceship made strange whooshing, wheezing noises and faded from sight. She decided that she would wait until he felt better before reaching out to him; after all, somebody still needed to look at the crack in her bedroom wall.

She turned around and walked back into her house, the blue sphere cupped tightly in her hands. It was sort of like glass, but a lot lighter than she expected it to be. She didn't quite know how to use it, but she figured that it would work when it needed to. She showed it to her aunt, who marveled that it seemed to pulse with a steady blue heartbeat. Then her aunt ushered up to bed and tucked her in and read her a bedtime story about the Roman civilization, except that the girl fell asleep halfway through, assured that the Doctor would come back for her—even as ghostly murmurs drifted from the crack in her wall and spiraled down into her dreams, filling her mind with tendrils of golden light weaving through the endless void of space, of the little blue box spinning through the ashes of enemies, the scattered remnants of foes completely obliterated by the Oncoming Storm, the Beast, the Destroyer of Worlds.

And, body pressed flush against the wall on the other side of the crack, a woman wept with whispered warnings that barely reached Amelia Pond's ears as she woke the next day to a familiar wheezing and groaning, followed by a sudden crash as the Doctor's spaceship crushed the remaining walls of the shed in her backyard.

The ten-year old ran outside in her little red boots, so eager to see the Doctor again that she did not notice the sphere, discarded on the ground next to the abandoned storybook, was no longer a steady blue, but a throbbing and urgent red.

She crashed into the Doctor as he emerged from his blue Police Box, and she went to cry his name joyfully, but what came out instead were the two words she had heard all night.

"_Bad Wolf_."


	2. lonely Amelia

The Doctor looked down at her, surprise and confusion flashing in quick succession across his face. "_What_?"

Amelia Pond stepped back from him. "That's what the crack in my wall keeps saying, Doctor," she said, taking a closer look at him this time. Despite seeing him just yesterday, he seemed… different. His face wasn't scratched, bruised, and burned; his suit wasn't riddled with holes, but instead actually seemed cleaned and pressed; and his demeanor held none of that fright and guilt and pain from yesterday.

The Doctor gave her a strange look, almost as if he didn't remember her; but that was rubbish, as they'd just met yesterday. "Bad Wolf," he mused. "Ah… how long have you been hearing this voice… ah…" He gestured towards her, wordlessly asking her to... to what?

When she could do nothing but stare at him, the Doctor withdrew his hand and used it to rub the back of his neck awkwardly. "Well, I can't very well help you if I don't know your name." His face brightened with a wide grin as he stuck out his hand to shake. "Hello; I'm the Doctor."

"I already knew that," said Amelia slowly, confusion also growing in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps he'd been more injured than she thought to have forgotten her so quickly. But then again, he looked perfectly fine now; still, she ventures the worried question. "Are you alright now?"

The Doctor rubbed his hands together. "Alright? I've never felt any better in my life! Well, I say better, but perhaps I mean to say really good. Well, pretty good. Well, it couldn't get any worse, could it? Oo, I take that back."

He certainly didn't seem like the anguished man who had crashed into her backyard yesterday. He was certainly the same man, but he seemed much happier now. Amelia just couldn't figure out for the life of her how the Doctor could swing between two emotional temperaments all with the space of twelve hours.

Before she could question him further, however, the Doctor exclaimed, "The crack in your wall!" And with that, he bounded forward, his long legs taking him all the way up to her front door as she scrambled behind. He whirled through the laundry room to the kitchen, his eyes darting everywhere at once. "To your bedroom… What was your name?"

"Amelia Pond."

"To Amelia's bedroom! …Where?"

"Upstairs," she supplied, and he took the stairs three at a time. "The fourth room away from the staircase."

"Fourth room?" he cried. "Four rooms up here and you live in the fourth? Who lives in the other three rooms?"

Amelia shrugged as she finally caught up to the lanky form paused at the top of the staircase. "They're empty."

"Nonononono," the Doctor said quickly. "No. Empty?" He double-checked the three empty rooms and seemed mystified that they were indeed empty. Bare white walls, empty floors; nothing. He whirled on her. "Where do your parents sleep?"

And there was the question that everybody eventually came around to asking. "Don't have any," she replied simply.

"Ah. Relatives?"

"Don't have any."

"Caretakers?"

"No."

The Doctor paused, his hand on the knob of the door to her bedroom. Not turning to face her, he murmured quietly, "You live by yourself?"

Amelia nodded slowly and waited for the stunned horror to pass.

Only it never appeared on his face in the first place. As his head swiveled to face her, his expression remained the same: a slightly puzzled curiosity. "Nobody, then," he mumbled, more to himself than as a confirming question to her. And he twisted the doorknob and pushed her bedroom door open.

Now this room was definitely occupied. It was as if, in order to make up for all the large, empty rooms in the large, mostly empty house, this small girl had crammed as much as she could into her small bedroom. A large bed—personally, Amelia felt that it was too large and too empty—occupied most of her room. Stuffed animals covered an entire wall, encroaching on the adjacent bookshelves filled with picture books detailing the culture of Roman civilization at the peak of its empire. And then the crack in her wall: that big, empty, white wall with an ugly crack splitting it into two uneven top and bottom halves.

Unexpectedly, though, the Doctor did not immediately inspect the crack. Instead, he sank to his hands and knees and peered at a book lying on the floor. Her favorite book, in fact; a fictional picture novel about the Roman empire. She couldn't exactly remember how it got there. Perhaps she read it to herself last night before she fell asleep… she's actually having trouble remembering what happened after she met the Doctor. So maybe she shouldn't be so hard on him for not remembering her name or who she was, when she couldn't even remember how she fell asleep last night.

The Doctor squinted at the book, turning his head this way and that. Then his head suddenly snapped upwards, his eyes focused on the crack in the wall, as if hearing something suddenly.

And then Amelia heard it too: that same voice, calling throughout the endless nights, reaching for her in the depths of her nightmares and dreams. That woman's voice. A distant sob, followed by a whispered warning.

"_Bad Wolf. Tell him, Amelia Pond. Bad Wolf."_

The Doctor instantly plastered himself to the wall, every inch of available body splayed against its flat surface. For just a second, Amelia saw that haunted, sorrowful pain in the depths of his eyes—and then, as if bouncing off a trampoline, the Doctor sprang backwards a foot or two and aimed a glowing blue stick at the crack. A whirring whine issued from the metal tube, causing Amelia to slap her hands over her ears at its sheer shrillness.

"Doctor, what is it?" she questioned when he snapped the stick upwards, inspecting it closely. The blue light purred and died out, allowing Amelia to release her ears.

"It's a sonic screwdriver," answered the Doctor absentmindedly, still interpreting whatever the device was telling him.

"No, Doctor, I meant… what is… why is the crack there? I looked at the outside wall of my house. There isn't a crack there. And there definitely is not a woman standing outside. Where does she—"

The Doctor suddenly turned the whirring blue sonic on her. Amelia instinctively flinched, but nothing happened, other than the light intensity of an LED shining into her eyes. He snapped up to screwdriver close to his face again. "Small Amelia Pond," he mused softly. "Living and surviving in a large house, all on her lonesome." He looked at her curiously for a moment, then turned his attention back to the crack in the wall. "You see that?"

Amelia nodded wordlessly.

"That," the Doctor said, adjusting his sonic screwdriver without looking away from the wall, "is not a crack in the wall. That… is a crack in the universe."

Frankly, this sounded like complete rubbish. Still, the Doctor who crashed into her backyard twice and didn't seem to know her either time seemed to encounter weird things like this on a regular basis, so her simple mind decided to accept that. "A crack… in the universe?" she repeated.

"I'll bet," the Doctor said, scanning the wall and readjusting his sonic yet again, "That if you were to remove this wall, the crack would still be there. Just hanging in the fabric of this reality, hanging there in what would seem to you as midair."

Something about the way the Doctor said _you_ seemed to imply that _he_ was not. Whatever category _you_ fell into, though, Amelia didn't know. She wanted to ask, but the Doctor seemed to be concentrating very hard on his sonic screwdriver.

"Now, if I set my sonic to setting 493B2…" the Doctor pointed the screwdriver at the crack, whereupon it whirred a brilliant blue; in response, brilliant blue light seeped from the crack itself, flickering radiantly in Amelia's face. It was so bright that she had to squeeze her eyes shut; but just before she closed her eyes, she thought she saw a figure standing just at the edge of her vision. She couldn't be sure.

The light washed over her and then it was gone. Her vision returned as she opened her eyes, revealing a blank wall.

The crack in her wall was gone!

Amelia felt relief sweep over her—yet at the same time, a sense of loss.

Why?

It's not like she'd wanted any different. She'd spent so many hours taking care of herself—making breakfast, going to school, heading over to Rory's house afterwards for homework and dinner—and then spent just as many hours sleeping in her too-large bed in her too-large house underneath that crack. It haunted her dreams and echoed in her thoughts long after she'd woken up. She ought to be happy that she could now return home without fear of those whispers drifting and snaking and twisting their way into her unconscious thoughts.

Yet, with the disappearance of the crack in the universe, Amelia couldn't help but feel as though she'd lost something to the crack, and now that it was gone, she'd never get it back.


	3. lonely Doctor

The first thing the Doctor had noticed upon walking into Amelia Pond's bedroom was not the crack on the wall. Yes, that was quite important—but no, he'd sensed the little blue ball, still blinking red in a far corner of the room. The beacon had probably led the TARDIS right to this location.

The problem was that the Doctor couldn't ever remember giving the help beacon to this particular girl.

And there was the problem of the empty rooms. Such a large house; so many empty rooms. Plus one little girl in a highly unlikely situation. She couldn't have survived on her own, in such a large house, all by herself for ten years, could she? Hardly. This was supported by the help beacon… and the book hastily dropped next to bed. Amelia didn't seem to notice it at all, but it had stood out the moment the Doctor had entered her bedroom. It was the one object that hadn't been stored neatly away in its proper place. Instead, it looked as if it had been suddenly dropped… as if the person once holding it had suddenly vanished into thin air.

While standing next to the crack in the universe.

Why Amelia Pond had not disappeared as well, though… He didn't know. It was quite the mystery.

Mysteries. He loved them.

Which brought him to the next one: the whisper he heard was achingly, heartbreakingly familiar. Yet it was through a crack in the universe, and those were never any good. Cracks in the universe, running through not only width and length and height, but also through space and time, cracks running through the folds of reality itself? Not good.

Not good, he had to keep telling himself. Not even one particular crack that emptied out into the expanse of the Void before somehow finding its way to a parallel crack in a parallel universe. A crack through which whispers floated gently, a simple two-worded warning that instantly caught his attention.

He had to seal the crack. He didn't know why Amelia Pond remained safe, despite being the residence within the closest proximity to the damage in the space-time continuum; it seemed as if the majority of Amelia's family had fallen prey to the crack.

That large house. All those large, empty rooms. The one girl, whom, up to what was most likely yesterday, had once been tucked into bed and read a nighttime story about the Roman Empire by… a parental figure. Somebody who had showed her love. Amelia had once had somebody; now she was alone.

The Doctor saw himself in Amelia, and so he decided to help her in the only way he knew how.

He pointed his screwdriver at the crack and began the arduous task of sealing it shut.

But when the Doctor sonic'd the crack, he certainly had not expected the crack to initially widen slightly. The light blazed into his eyes, yet he did not look away. He did not look away… because, try as he might, he could not but give up the possible opportunity to see _her_ again.

But the woman he barely caught a glimpse of—more like a girl, standing on the peripheries of his vision, just barely out of sight—it was not her. It was not his former time-traveling companion. It was a complete stranger, somebody whom he'd never met before.

Or perhaps he had. Though he certainly did not hold any memories of her (and the Doctor always remembered), the Doctor felt a strange resonance. Ripples across space and time; echoes all along his time stream.

That phantom remnant of a memory hovered on the sidelines, however, as more crushing thoughts overwhelmed him: though he could hear her through the crack in space and time, she was not there on the other side of the crack. She was not in her alternate dimension.

Now that just raised more questions than answers. Not that any answers had been answered in the first place.

And then the crack sealed itself halfway shut—much like, well, perhaps a roll of cardboard, with one end (the parallel universe) now squashed shut and the rest of the Void crashing together, running along the length of the cardboard roll until it reached the other end (here at Amelia's bedroom) and sealed that shut as well. For now, for just a second, the Doctor stared into the empty Void of the time/space continuum, watching as it collapsed onto itself, mending the tear in the fabric of the universe…

Yet the figure of the strangely familiar brunette remained, still hovering in the depths of that abstract emptiness between the walls of the universes. Nothing should be able to exist in that vacant non-reality. One could travel swiftly across the Void with a Dimensional Transporter, those little metal discs with yellow activator buttons that Pete and Mickey and Jackie had used during the battle at Canary Wharf. But once one fell into the Void, one simply stopped existing.

Except for that girl. She was impossible. Where no Dalek, no Cyberman, no human could possibly exist, she did.

And then he could no longer see her, because the crack had also closed in Amelia's room.

For several seconds, the Doctor could do little more than stare at the empty wall. He had wanted to see the woman he'd lost; instead, he had received the impossible girl.

* * *

_A/N: Can you guess who Amelia Pond's aunt is?_


End file.
